Sally the Sleuth

Created by Adolphe Barreaux (1899-1985)
Pseudonyms include Charles Barr

One of the oldest comic strip heroes ever, predating even the Man of Steel, SALLY THE SLEUTH first popped up in the November 1934 issue of Culture Publication's Spicy Detective pulp mag, in a steamy little two-page comic back-up feature nestled in there amongst all the other steamy little short prose stories and novellas of square-jawed, hard-boiled cops and private dicks, and trembling (and half-dressed) damsels in distress.

Sally, of course, was often depicted less than half-dressed, though she wasn't much for trembling. She was nobody's bimbo.

The basic scenario of most of her early adventures was pretty much set in concrete right in that debut. In two black and white pages (twelve panels in all), Sally, initially fully dressed in a business-like fashion, is dispatched by her private detective boss "The Chief" to investigate some nefarious criminal or another, often going undercover as a showgirl or some other role that requires some rather suggestive attire and behaviour.

Thanks to her sharp (and often miraculously intuitive) detective skills (and the fact that men often think with their dicks, and never suspect someone as attractive as Sally could ever pose a threat to them), she soon gets the goods on the culprit, only to have the tables turned on her, whereupon she finds herself at the mercy of the villain and his henchmen, in some state of undress (usually bra and panties), fearing for her life... or worse. Bondage and the threat of rape are common scenarios, and dungeons and whips show up with alarming frequency.

Occasionally Sally has backup, in the form of Peanuts, a disturbing little kid who seems to be there mostly to leer at Sally's predicament and/or run to get help. Fortunately, Sally doesn't have to rely constantly on the pint-size perv -- she's actually quite resourceful and often has a gun hidden somewhere (despite being naked), and somehow usually manages to escape on her own.

Throughout her run in Spicy Detective (and its retitled, slightly toned down successor, Speed Detective), Sally's adventures rarely strayed far from the formula. Her last appearance in Speed Detective, "Night Club Trail," even featured a cameo by Robert Leslie Bellem's Dan Turner (whose own comic adventures were drawn by Barreaux), but Culture wasn't done with her yet.

Sally popped up in another of Cultures's pulps, Private Detective, in a handful of eight-page adventures, and those final stories were reprinted (and colourized) in Crime Smashers, under Culture's Trojan imprint.

Oh, by then the stories had expanded from two to eight pages, the rigid six-panel layouts were gone, the sleaziness was turned down slightly (as in, Sally managed to solve crimes without stripping down to her undies, although she did seem to have an inordinate number of wardrobe malfunctions) and the plots became slightly more complex, but the basic "Sally investigates. Sally gets captured. Sally escapes" plotlines rarely changed, whether the villains were lecherous crimelords, sexual fiends or Nazis.

But two page black and white or eight pages of colour, Sally remained upbeat and resourceful, determined and cheerful, always ready to crack wise and go wherever "The Chief" sent her. In later strips, it's hinted that The Chief and his plucky "girl assistant" were romantically involved, but that's as far as that went.

The saving grace, for me at least, was that Sally was shown to be smart and inventive, and a pretty shrewd detective (increasingly so in the later stories, in fact), despite her at times reckless naivetée, and that she manages to save herself at least as often as she's rescued, as Hope Nicholson's The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen pointedly notes.

All in all, Sally's adventures were hardly the good clean fun they were no doubt once intended as. The whiff of sleazy voyeurism and rape-as-entertainment haven't aged well, although the original stories are still enjoyable as cheese; almost touching at times in their simplistic innocence.

Hardly a feminist role model, then, but in her own way, wide-eyed Sally paved the way for later, more empowered and enlightened female sleuths, and as The Spectacular Sisterhood of Superwomen concludes, "Sally the Sleuth is one of the original female heroines in comics, and she should be celebrated accordingly... because of her roots as a fetish detective heroine, hers might be one part of history you don't want your kids to read, even if it was your grandparents who created her."

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During his long career, Adolphe Barreaux worked as an artist, illustrator and writer, and ran his own advertising agency. By the early thirties, he had begun drawing illustrations for many of Harry Donenfeld's Culture Publications, and he soon convinced Donenfeld to take a chance on featuring a Sally the Sleuth comic as a feature in his pulps. The first comic appeared in the November 1934 issue of Spicy Detective, and it was an immediate hit. Soon many of the Spicy titles were featuring similar comics, including the afore-mentioned Dan Turner, as well as Diana Daw, Marcia of the Movies, Polly of the Plains, The Astounding Adventures of Olga Messmer, The Girl with the X-Ray Eyes, and Vera Ray, most of them done by Barreaux or his agency. It was the start of a long relationship, with Barreaux eventually going on to serve as editor for many of Donenfeld's pulp and comic publications, including Crime Fiction Stories, Hollywood Detective, Pocket Detective Magazine, Private Detective Stories, Super-Detective and Crime Smashers, which ran reprints and new stories featuring Sally.